News

09/24: Congratulations to Sam, who officially concluded his postdoc in the lab and started a new role as a senior statistical geneticist at Genomics PLC. 

09/24: Jared et al.'s paper on sexually-differential selection in humans is now out in PNAS.

08/24: Katy, Xinyi (EEB) and Charlotte (CS) officially join the lab for their Ph.D.! Shreya joins the lab as a visiting Fulbright student. Welcomel!

08/24: Joyce, Neeka and colleagues' work, on "three open questions in polygenic score portability", is now up on bioRxiv. 

08/24: Sam's manuscript co-led by Alice MacQueen and Li Zhang on GxWeather interactions in Switchgrass plants, a result of our collaboration with our nextdoor neighbors at the Juenger Lab, is now up on bioRxiv. 

07/24: Jared and Matt both posted preprints on work they led on sex-differential selection in humans---on the same day! Jinx! 

07/24: Congratulations to Eric, Sam and Rebecca whose theoretical work on tradeoffs in modeling Gene-by-Environment interactions in complex trait genetics is out at eLife! 

06/24: Sam Smith and Greg Darnell et al.'s paper on their extension to LD Score Regression for analyzing genetic interactions is now out at eLife. Congratulations Sam!

06/24: Thanks to the efforts and discoveries of lab member past, present, and future, Arbel was selected as a 2024-2028 Pew Scholar

06/24: Charlotte, a PhD student in Computer Science, and Neeka, an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Business joined the lab for the summer. Welcome Charlotte and Neeka!

06/24: Olivia's paper on her software to analyze genomic feature enrichment in GWAS data is now out in the Journal of Open Source Software!

06/24: Our work on genetic adaptation in New York City rats was celebrated in the GBE's 40's anniversary special issue

03/24: Lab representatives shared their work and had a blast at at TAGC / PEQG 2024 in Washington DC

02/24: The lab had a blast at playing (electric) shuffle board in Downtown Austin. 

11/23: Jed's manuscript with John Benning and Ruth Shaw is up on bioRxiv. It is a response to Clark (PNAS, 2023), a paper that argued for genetic determination of social status and strong assortative mating for a "social genotype" in England in the last four centuries.  

11/23: Sam and Joyce presented their work at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Washington DC. Sam on "A litmus test for confounding in polygenic scores" and Joyce on "The portability of polygenic scores depends on more than genetic ancestry."

08/23: Thanks to hard work of lab members past, present and future, we won funding for five years from the NIH for "Making Genomic Prediction on Complex Traits Equitable". We are looking for colleagues to join us for the 'future' bit!

06/23: We welcome two statistics students from USTC to the lab this summer, Xinyi Miao and Jingsong Zhou, as well as a UT Austin CS student, Regina Ye. Welcome! 

05/23: Two new preprints: work led by Eric on tradeoffs in modeling GxE in complex traits, and work led by Sam on iLDSC, a method to capture heritability hiding in genetic interactions. 

04/2023: Carrie Zhu and colleagues' paper about sex-specific effects on complex traits has been published at Cell Genomics. Congratulations to Carrie, Matt, Jared and co-authors!

03/2023: Dinesh Elanchezhian joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome, Dinesh! 

12/2022: Sam Smith has officially joined the lab! We are beyond excited to have Sam here.  

12/2022: Arbel gave a virtual seminar at Columbia University Biostatistics and discussed recent work from Carrie and others. 

11/2022: Arbel virtually visited UCLA's Ecology and Evolution and Human Genetics departments and discussed recent work from the lab by Carrie, Matt, Eric and others. 

11/2022: We are delighted to have Dr. Jed Carlson join the lab as a Research Associate. Welcome Jed!

10/2022: Applications the Stengl-Wyer Postdoctoral Scholar positions are due by Dec. 5th,. If you are a recent or soon to be PhD, interested in studying natural diversity / organisms in their environment (broadly defined) with us, please get in touch. 

09/2022: Congratulations to Sam Smith, an incoming postdoc who has won the American Society of Human Genetics' Cotterman Award for his doctoral work at Brown University!

08/2022: Welcome to Liaoyi Xu and Lisa Phan, ILSGP Cell and Molecular Biology graduate students who joined our lab for a rotation this fall semester!

08/2022: Our preprint, "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe", together with the Narasimhan Lab at UT and Reich Lab at Harvard, is now up on bioRxiv! Congratulations to grad students Megan Le and Olivia Smith

06/2022: In the PEQG 2022 meeting at Asilomar, CA: Carrie will present a poster on her work on gene-by-sex interaction in complex human traits; Jared Cole will present our joint work with the Kirkpatrick Lab (led by Jared) on sexually-antagonistic selection.

05/2022: We got back from the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Carrie presented a poster on her work on gene-by-sex interaction in complex human traits. Arbel presented a talk on our work on decomposing polygenic scores into direct effects vs. other factors.  We had a lot of fun meeting old and new friends!

02/2022: Carrie got into her medical school of choice!! She will start on this new exciting path this fall.

02/2022: New webinar available! Arbel presented our work on the molecular underpinnings of an adaptation that allowed Leptodactylus frogs to feed on toxic toads at the Israeli Society for Evolutionary Biology conference at the Weizmann Institute. 

02/2022: Sean Lau starts at the lab as an undergraduate researcher, and Eric Weine will join us as a research scientist in March. Welcome Sean and Eric!

01/2022: Our work on genetic adaptation in NYC rats was selected as one of the top 10 urban evolution papers of 2021 by the "Life in the City" Blog.

11/2021: Joyce Wang presented the results of her rotation project---quantifying the relationship between genetic dissimilarity and the portability of polygenic score---to members of the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Programs here at UT Austin.

10/2021: Arbel participated in The Hastings Center's panel for journalists on Genomics, Human Behavior and Social Outcomes

08/2021: As we begin the 2021-22 academic year, Rebecca Knowlton and Amber Day (both in the Statistics and Data Science PhD program) join us for their research electives, and Joyce Wang (Cell and Molecular Biology PhD program) begins her fall rotation at the lab. Welcome, Rebecca, Amber and Joyce!

08/2021: Matt Ming joins the lab (joint with the Kirkpatrick Lab) for his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. Welcome Matt!

06/2021: New commentary at PNAS with Doc Edge about indirect parental genetic effects and GWAS: "GWAS deems parents guilty by association

04/2021: Now out at Current Biology: How did a group of Neotropical Grass Frogs evolve to feed on toxic toads? We used evolutionary genetics to pinpoint the substitutions underlying the functional adaptation.

03/2021: Carrie Zhu joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher and Olivia Smith, a CMB Computational Biology grad student, joins us for her spring rotation. Welcome Carrie and Olivia!

01/2021: New paper at PLoS Biology with Molly Przeworski on "The evolution of group differences in changing environments".